How to Train Your Mind to Focus?

We have all experienced situations where we were expected to pay attention to what was going on around us while in a meeting or class. However, thoughts about the long list of things we have to accomplish or could have done if we weren't stuck there have been taking up a lot of our time.

But relax; you're not the only one whose mind drifts. In fact, more than 2,000 adults were observed in a recent study by psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert while they went about their regular lives. 47% of the time, they weren't paying attention to what they were doing, and even more unexpected is that being distracted makes people less happy.

Therefore, it's good to identify strategies to lessen the things that make people's minds wander and to sharpen their focus. Ironically, if we invest our mind's wandering correctly, using the age-old practice of meditation, it can actually help us increase our levels of concentration. In truth, a recent wave of studies illuminates the breadth of cognitive and emotional advantages of increasing the level of focus as well as what transpires in our minds when our attention is diverted.

What Happens in a Wandering Mind?

What do we really know about something as common as distraction?

For thousands of years, meditation-based practices have provided many means by which we can understand the innermost secrets of the soul and know the processes that take place in our minds. Mind wandering may appear strange, but it actually plays a vital part in the practice of focused attention meditation. The practitioner is instructed to concentrate their attention on one thing throughout this fundamental meditation pattern, such as the bodily sensations brought on by breathing.

It sounds easy, but putting it into practice is harder than just talking about it. So give it a shot for a while and observe the results.

If you are like most people, your mind will soon become preoccupied with rumination, imagination, analysis, and planning. At a certain point, you will notice that your focus is no longer on your breath, and then you can expel the idea that distracts you and direct your focus on your breath again, but it is likely that this will happen again shortly after.

At first, it may seem that the mind's tendency to wander can get in the way of being able to practice focused meditation, especially when attention is distracted from focusing on your breath.

Despite this, the purpose of practicing focused attention meditation is to highlight the natural path of the mind and work to make you more capable of controlling how you direct your attention and move from a state of mind wandering to a state of focus. With repeated practice, it will not take long for you to notice that you are daydreaming or meditating, and it becomes easier to direct your focus away from the current stream of thoughts occupying your mind and bring your attention back to your breathing. For those who practice focused attention meditation, it becomes easier to get rid of distracting thoughts.

Neuroscientists, especially meditators, have long been interested in knowing what goes on in a person's mind when they meditate. Familiarity with the practice of meditation on the one hand, and scientific research on the other hand, leads to the question of what will happen if these two methods are combined together to obtain a more accurate perception of how this process occurs inside the brain. This is done by testing the transition of the mind from a state of wandering to a state of concentration during the practice of meditation.

You might start thinking first with the default mode network, which is a group of areas in the brain that become more active when we are not engaged in another action. That is, when we are absent-minded, it may be this default mode network that keeps interfering during meditation with our ability to focus our attention, or it may be what we are trying to learn to tune in by practicing it over and over again, and this must be tested scientifically.

With financial support from the Mind & Life Institute, and with the help of staff at Emory University, studies about which brain areas are involved in meditation has been carried out; Meditation practitioners were asked to focus on their breath while scanning their brains, and it turned out that whenever they noticed their minds wandering, they would press a button, so that they could restore their focus on their breath again as usual, and the practice would continue. As they did so, MRI data was collected to reveal which brain areas were active before, during, or after pressing the button, and which correspond to different mental states.

The study, published in Neuro Image, found that during periods of mind-wandering, areas of the default mode network in the brain became active, and then, when participants became aware of it their mind-wandering, brain regions responsible for detecting salient events became active. Then, it activated regions of the brain's executive network, redirecting attention to the designated target, all within twelve seconds of pressing the button.

Looking at the neural activity within these brain networks, it can be concluded that when you are absent-minded, you first go through a phase of realizing it and then switch from processing the default situation with the participation of many neural networks responsible for attention. Understanding how the brain works in states of focus and distraction has implications for a variety of daily tasks.

For example, when you lose focus in a meeting, it can be helpful to know that you go into default mode, where you redirect your focus to what's going on around you at the moment—a skill you can improve over time.

Benefits of Improving Focus:

What are the other practical implications of practicing meditation? Recent behavioral research shows that the practice of meditation helps develop multiple aspects of attention, especially that practicing meditation strengthens memory, increases IQ, and improves student performance in exams.

It's no surprise that this kind of repetitive mental training is like going to the gym, except you're building your mind instead of your muscles, and the mind-wandering here is like adding weight to a barbell machine. You need some resistance to enhance the skill you're building without mind-wandering getting in the way of your attempts to stay focused. How can you develop the skills of monitoring your state of mind and directing your attention?

In this study, the effect of a lifetime of meditation practice on mental activity was examined. In conjunction with the increasing number of studies, the experiment was found to be of high importance, which showed that more experienced meditation practitioners had different levels of mental activity in the relevant networks. This suggests that the workings of their brains may have changed as a result of the frequent meditation practice, which is known as neuroplasticity.

One area of the brain stood out when performing this analysis: the medial prefrontal cortex, which is part of the default mode network associated specifically with self-centered thoughts and significantly contributes to mind-wandering. It turns out that experienced meditation practitioners were able to deactivate this region more quickly after becoming aware of a mind-wandering state than those who did not meditate as much, which indicates that they are better able to get rid of distracting thoughts, such as thinking about their to-do list or some simple task they found difficult to do yesterday.

In a later study, it was found that these same participants had a stronger association between activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and areas of the brain that allow for the isolation of attention. This means that the areas of the brain responsible for intentional distraction have greater access to the areas of the brain that cause distraction, making distraction easier. Other findings support this idea, as more experienced meditation practitioners have a stronger connection between the default mode and the brain regions responsible for attention. They have less default mode activity while meditating.

This explains how, as you gain more experience with your meditation practice, you can get rid of distracting thoughts more easily, thus enhancing your ability to focus. Since you have reprogrammed your mind to make it more capable of recognizing the state of mind-wandering and getting out of it. If you have previously suffered from rethinking past painful experiences and recalling them over and over again, or if you feel negative tension about a future event, it will be useful for you to get rid of negative thoughts.

In fact, the Killingsworth and Gilbert study we mentioned earlier found that when people are distracted, they tend to be less happy. This is often because they bring up bad experiences or trigger stress, which is why mindfulness meditation has become an increasingly important treatment for mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, PTSD, and even impotence.

Knowing all this might make you think that we would be better off if we could live our lives in a constant state of piercing focus, but mind wandering is not all bad; by investing it properly, we can build our focus in addition to the ability to detach from reality and imagine mock scenarios. It is in itself a great evolutionary value, which may explain why it is so prominent in our mental lives.

These processes allow for creativity and planning, sharpen the imagination, and enhance memory. They are essential to our survival and, of course, to the very essence of being human.

The key is learning to recognize and use these mental tendencies mindfully rather than letting them control us, and meditation can help with that.

So don't be so hard on yourself the next time you catch your mind wandering. This is because wandering is normal. Use this as an opportunity to become more familiar with your mental experience, but you may want to refocus and direct your attention back to the present moment before answering that question everyone is still waiting for you to answer.